Student Food and Baking Blog by a Student

Candy Crush Birthday Cake

It’s my birthday today woo!!!!!!! And this year I made my own birthday cake with the theme of Candy Crush.

If you haven’t played Candy Crush before, it’s a simple swap and match game with different candies. As you progress through the game, the game gets increasingly more difficult and complex with the introduction of special candies and powerups.

I had the idea to make this cake when I saw these chocolate jazzles on offer in my local discount store and they reminded me of one of the powerups in the game itself. I am a big fan of the game, in fact I am on Level 817 and have been stuck for a while. So I did some research into what Candy Crush cakes had been done already and many of them used fondant to make the candies themselves but I decided to use actual sweets for the playing board.

It wasn’t easy to find sweets that had the exact colour and shape as in the game so I did a lot of research into finding the best shapes and colours. Here are the sweets I used:

Yellow – yellow chocolate dragees

Orange – orange wine gums

Green – green wine gums, cut into squares

Blue – blue bonbons

Red – red jelly beans

Purple – purple fruit pastilles

Colour bombs – chocolate jazzles

Liquorice wheels – liquorice allsorts, cut into 0.5cm slices

Coconut wheels – pink liquorice allsorts, cut in half

Hazelnuts – hazelnuts

Furthermore I unashamedly use a sponge mix for my birthday cake. There are just some times when you cannot be bothered to make the sponge but actually this sponge mix gives me the lightest and fluffiest sponge. Feel free to use your favourite sponge recipe or favourite sponge mix, just make enough to fill a 14x10x2in roasting tin.

2 x 230g packs of sponge mix and for my sponge mix, I need 2 eggs and 100ml water; follow the guidelines on your packets or use your own favourite sponge recipe

1 quantity of white chocolate cream cheese icing which you can find here

Black food colouring paste

Sweets, as detailed above

25 shopbought rectangular biscuits, measuring 6cm x 4cm

75g icing sugar

About 2 tbsp water

Make a sponge that fits into a 14x10x2in roasting tin and cool on a wire rack, making sure that you grease and line the tin and keeps the cake in the parchment.

Colour about a third of the frosting a deep grey colour. Place into a piping bag fitted with a small round nozzle to pipe lines. Place the white frosting into a piping bag and place both into the fridge.

Make a water icing by mixing icing sugar with enough water to form a thick spreadable icing. Use a palette knife to spread a thin layer of the icing on the biscuits and allow to set and dry.

Pipe a generous layer of the white frosting on the cake and spread into an even layer. Arrange the biscuits on top, cutting the biscuits to fit the shape of your cake. With a ruler, pipe 10 dots of the grey frosting 1cm from the right short edge that are 2cm apart. Moving left from the last dot, again pipe 10 more dots 2cm apart to create a square that is 18cm by 18cm. Join the dots up vertically and horizontally to create 81 squares.

Spread the sweets with a little water icing to stick the sweets in the squares, following the pattern below, or any pattern you wish. Any blank spaces can be filled in with more of the grey frosting. On the left hand side, pipe rectangles to fit the powerups and the score.

You can pipe any numbers you want and use any sweets for this but I use another chocolate jazzle, another liquorice allsort and a pink chocolate dragee. I pipe a ‘+’ with the grey frosting on top.

Then using some of the white frosting, pipe Candy Crush on the top. Spread some more around the outside and use to stick a pattern of chocolate dragees around the outside.

That’s how I celebrated my birthday this year. I’m looking forward to celebrating the rest of my birthday with my friends and I am now legally old enough to drive, old enough to donate blood and old enough to be interviewed by the police without an adult present. I hope I will never have anything to do with the last one.